Hangul syllable Hwel

It spells one Korean syllable; the surrounding word gives it meaning.

Pronounce 휄 roughly as hwel: the Korean consonant ㅎ begins it, vowel ㅞ supplies the middle, and consonant ㄹ closes it with an l-like sound. Inside a Korean word, the block is one syllable of the spelling.

The Annals of King Sejong, a royal chronicle, record Hangul's creation in 1443. The alphabet was explained and promulgated in 1446 in Hunminjeongeum, a text introducing its letters. It was designed to make Korean speech easier to write, since Chinese characters were difficult to use for Korean sounds.

How did Hangul's role change?

It began as a royal writing reform and became Korean's everyday script.

The alphabet was first called Hunminjeongeum; Hangeul is its later name. Its role grew from a royal writing reform into the established way to write Korean. A Korean IME joins ㅎ, ㅞ, and ㄹ as 휄. Unicode also represents the same syllable in decomposed form as 휄; normalization can combine those letters into 휄, and a Hangul syllable block stays intact at a line break.

Some scholars have argued that the Phags-pa script influenced Hangul's design; that relationship remains debated.